The Gigantic Collection of Star Trek Minutiae is undergoing another site style change. The redesigned pages will require visitors to use Apple’s new Safari browser to access all pages. A text-only archive of STM’s content will be retained for visitors using other browsers. For more information, read on below.
The Internet is ever-changing. From the introduction of the first Netscape browser in the early 1990’s, there’s constantly been competition between various companies to “control” the Internet through spreading their own software to as many users as possible. Since 1998 or so, Microsoft has established a near-stranglehold on the viewing of information with their own Internet Explorer application. Unfortunately, in the race to get their products position the quality has suffered in many ways. Speed of transmission and rendering, the display of malformed HTML code, and the support for the latest standards advocated by the World Wide Web Corporation. All of this has led to a major state of confusion on the Internet, and the need for software programmers to account for possible permutation of malformed code in pages.
Despite the current prominence of MSIE in the browser market (thanks to their incredibly arrogant and illegal marketing tactics, but we won’t go into that here — and I’m not bitter anyway, really!), there are signs of a new “browser war” developing. In the past year or so, alternative browsers have been gaining popularity — Mozilla (and its spinoffs Phoenix and Camino), OmniGroup’s OmniWeb, Opera, iCab... and the new kid on the block, Apple’s Safari.
Safari made a huge splash on January 7, 2003, when it was introduced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during the annual Macworld San Francisco trade show. The presentation itself amazed the audience, with the app’s smooth polished-metal appearance and blazingly fast rendering, not to mention the usual OS X niceties like the built-in Aqua anti-aliasing. Within hours, the news spread across Mac news sites across the Internet. Within hours after Apple CEO presented the new Safari app at the MacWorld San Francisco trade show, I’d downloaded it, tried it out, and was instantly won over. And I wasn’t the only one: Safari shattered all previous single-day total downloads record (300,000 in 24 hours) at Apple’s website, and was downloaded over a million times in less than two weeks. According to one MacWorld report, one day after Safari was launched, over 20% of the hits for many of the prominent Mac sites out there were from Safari browsers.
Safari’s speed and accuracy in rendering are certainly huge incentives, but for me the best feature is its high compliance with W3C standards. In the past year or so, buzzwords such as CSS, XML, DOM, JavaScript, and more have entered the awareness of many people on the Internet. But there’s one standard not mentioned before that’s completely brand-new: the W3C’s 2003 HTML 5.0 recommendation, which is currently paving the way for a whole new realm of possibilities for Internet browsing. Safari is the first browser to support this standard.
Based on these two pioneering advances in the past few months, I have made the decision to join this new “wave of the future” and use HTML 5.0 standards for “Star Trek Minutiae.” Although some might argue that it’s too early in the development process to use a brand-new standard — especially one as strict as HTML 5.0 which hasn’t yet been adopted by the majority of web browsers out there — I feel that those arguments are in fact perfect reasons for adopting the standard early, in order to promote awareness of the new opportunities and developments.
As for the issues surrounding Safari itself, I feel that these will be resolved quickly — within the next six months at most. Certainly, Safari is currently only in beta testing (with beta milestones posted by Apple on a monthly basis), but the browser is simply too incredible to wait for. (Webmasters interested in information concerning the 50+ reported rendering bugs should check this page: Safari Information for Web Designers.) Others might argue that Safari, being a browser only available for Macintosh OS X 10.2 (aka “Jaguar”), is not the type of browser that can reliably pioneer the new HTML 5.0 standard. However, those critics fail to recognize the huge awareness that Apple’s ongoing “Switch” campaign has achieved, as millions and millions of Windows users ditch their boring beige boxes for a beautiful snow iMac with the Aqua goodness of Mac OS X. Both of these reasons only add to my decision to change the focus of this site.
What are you still reading this for? Go download the latest version of Safari and check it out!
However, I am not unmindful of those who are forced to continue to use other types of browsers. Although I don’t have nearly enough time to maintain two different versions of the same website, I have devised a way to maintain a text-only mirror of the main site content for all visitors using non-Safari browsers. Rest assured, you won’t be left behind! I’ve always considered the text, and not the images, to be the most important aspect of my work.
Thanks for your interest in my web site! I look forward to many more years of contributing to the Trek online community.
Sincerely,
Dan Carlson, Webmaster
This page was last modified on Sunday, July 18, 2010.